Bloodless Coup

(four were worse, seven were better)

And, it made my day to see that Carter had more electoral votes than either Bush win. Jimmy Freakin' Carter!!! Ha ha ha ha ha!

That's wonderful, Baltar. It's nice to know that after a campaign where Bush bashers complained of Republican efforts to disenfranchise a million voters, that a true blue Kerry supporter decides the millions and millions of votes for Perot, Nader, and others just shouldn't have counted; that's very democratic of you.

Morris,

First, I'm not a true, blue, Kerry supporter. I'm a registered Republican who only voted Democratic for the first time this year(and only for President). Don't make accusations you can't sustain.

Second, why can't I discount them? What's wrong with my methodology? I'm not saying you shouldn't count their votes, I'm saying that every single one of them knew the person they were voting for wasn't going to get elected President, and so I didn't really count them in the general scheme of figuring how the votes for president broke down in the elections. I argue that the third party votes are irrelevant in the larger scheme of things. Show my why I'm wrong.

And, if you're talking electoral college votes, third party candidates don't have any, so they don't count in the final column you list.

Mandate shmandate. The President won re-election and is going to push his agenda regardless of what the libs think. He has every right to do so. After all, what would be the point of pushing an agenda that you didnt run on? Bush didnt come to the center, Bush didnt pander to the left to get votes. He ran on a clearly conservative platform and won. Now it's his job to put through what he promised he would. Call it a mandate or dont, it doesnt matter.

BigCountry

OK, I'll give you all of that, if the Republicans will stop pretending that they are anything but fairly-far-right ideologues. I don't mind the ideology (though I don't agree with most of it), but I do mind the Republicans claiming to be moderate and calling the Democrats tax-and-spend liberals (the last President to raise taxes was Bush I, and the present Bush II has spent more than Clinton). Call a horse a horse (and not-a-mandate, not-a-mandate) and we can end this debate now. All I ask for is a bit of truth, just a little, in the dialog.

Baltar,
If you argue that "third party votes are irrelevant in the larger scheme of things," you, as I said above and can sustain, are not being democratic. Independents have been elected to the Senate, the House, and I believe to governor as well though I'll have to defer to my brother on that. The Senate and House surely matter in the larger scheme of things. If you remember, Perot was gaining steam up until Stockdale's "Who am I? Why am I here?" In any case, it is decidedly undemocratic to suggest that because a candidate is not supported by the major parties right now, people should not be able to support another candidate. And it reflects a misapprehension of history to suggest that the two parties existing now will forever be the only alternatives Americans may embrace. Or did you see any ads for the Whig party this year?
Binky,
Zig Zag Baltar's point was to reapportion the popular vote to diminish Bush's victory, it wasn't about the electoral vote.

Zig? Zag? What's clear to me is that it's easier to obfuscate than attempt to apprehend his point. I don't agree with him, but I can admit I see where he is going.

Binky,
He's a Republican, then he supports a Democrat; when Zel Miller does the contrary, Kerry's friends call him Zig Zag, so why not here? By the way, if you keep using words like obfuscate and apprehend, you may replace Joshua as the ruler of fancy words.

Well, shoot, I got tens of thousands of dollars in debt learning those words, I gotta' use 'em now and again.

My mistake, I though you were calling me Zig Zag. Seeing as how I am a pretty consistent godless commie, I didn't understand.

Morris,

Of course I'm being democratic: people have the right to vote for whatever candidate from whatever major or minor party they want to. I have never, and will never, denied that. And clearly third parties can have an effect on the Presidential election (Nader in 2000, for example). However, that doesn't mean that they stand any sort of chance of becoming elected, and I think everyone knows that. Hence, I choose not to count them in the analysis. The major parties are the major parties, and that is unlikely to change. Your dart about the Whigs just proves my point: since the constitution was ratified in 1784, there have been exactly three political parties of consequence in this country, and the Whigs are the only one to die out (and all they really did was become the Republicans). There may be an independent who has been elected to the House (Sanders, I-VT), but he's basically a democrat (votes with them, attends their caucus). There has never, to my knowledge, been an independent elected to the Senate (perhaps years ago, but none modern). If you are refering to Jeffords (again, VT), he's never been elected. As for govenors, you would have to show me. I think one in CT a few years ago was an independent (and their's Jesse "the body" Ventura in Wisconsin), but the number of real independents that have won office in this country is minor - and ignorable.

You're just annoyed because Bush really doesn't have a mandate. As the chart clearly shows, Bush's electoral performace was below average for the last 12 elections, and the worst of any second term president. A mandate implies that a President's goals are so overwhelmingly accepted by the population that they vote clearly and significantly towards him. That didn't happen. No mandate.

Baltar,
I never said Bush had a mandate, but it is simply undermocratic to ignore whatever votes one thinks are "ignorable" to make a polical point. You do seem to forget that Bush is the first person in more than fifty years to be reelected while winning seats in the House and Senate for his party. My state hasn't had a Republican Senator in more than a hundred years...he was running against three Democrats...he was nothing but a rubber stamp for Bush...and he won. It's true, the Democratic party was a bunch of idiots for running ads talking about how he's a rubber stamp for Bush when they knew this was going to be a red state, and the most popular of his opponents supported cock fighting, but he still rolled back more than a century of tradition just because he rode on Bush's coat tails...I've seen this guy, and he's no prize. For freak sake, what does it matter if Bush had a mandate or not?

Baltar,

When has Bush professed to be anything but right wing? I dont understand your argument. He is clearly a conservative, he runs a conservative agenda, ran a conservative campaign, yet you say they are pretending to be anything but. We are at war, he has cut taxes, he wants to ban abortion, gay marriage, and embryonic stem cell research. What do you want him to say, "Hey y'all, I'm really right wing because all these issues are right wing issues."? I just dont see how you think he has ever proclaimed to be anything but far right, through words or just his actions.

Baltar can supply his own answer, big country, but let's look at Bush's using language like "compassionate conservative" to describe himself, or stressing his record in Texas of working across the aisle with Democrats. That sure sounds like a self-portrayal as something other than "far right wing." The question of whether you or anyone else believed him is another issue, but you asked about professions.

Look folks, Bush himself declared he had a mandate: this whole post was an attempt to argue that he did not. Morris can debate my statistics (though he has not offered an alternative), and BigCountry can wonder why I haven't noticed that Bush says he is right wing, but no one seems ready to address the central point: Bush (and many republicans) are claiming a mandate (and hence a right to govern from a far-right agenda), when they do not, in fact, have one. It's that simple.

You're welcome to prove me wrong, baltar, but I remember Bush saying he had political capital and intended to spend it. Did he really say he possessed a mandate?

The cited NYT story has a paragraph way down the first (web) page of a two page story:

Mr. Cheney, in introducing the president at the rally at the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center less than a half-mile from the White House, left little doubt about how this White House saw the election, and what it intended to do with it. He said the president had run "forthrightly on a clear agenda for this nation's future, and the nation responded by giving him a mandate."

I figure if Cheney says Bush has a mandate, that's good enough for me. Bush himself may have said it, though I can't find the quote off the top of my head.

Look, 60 million people seem to like Bush and what he has done and will do. So, I think the fact alone that he won, let alone with a record breaking number, should give him the go ahead to push his agenda. Whether they claim a mandate or not, what's the point. We all know whomever is in office is gonna push their agenda. Right?

BigCountry,

You are both right and wrong. Certainly, because Bush won, he has the right to govern the country in the manner that he thinks is "right". But the debate about whether he has a mandate is important in the scheme of figuring out just how much political capital he has. Winners with real mandates (Nixon's second term, Reagan's second term, and Johnson's first) took their overwhelming wins and turned them into major political programs (Johnson's "Great Society" program and war on poverty; Nixon's ending Vietnam; I'm not sure what Reagan did). The point was that the country recognized that the election made it so the President could push fairly radical (both left and right, depending on the election) changes in policy. If Bush has a mandate, he gets to push radical change and few legislators or members of his own party will challenge him. If he doesn't, then his radical agenda isn't clearly accepted by the people, and he should scale back his ambitions because the people (in the election) only gave him a narrow win. My argument is that Bush got a narrow victory, and thus has no real mandate or right to push a divisive agenda. That's why debate over the mandate is important. This debate determines the strength that Bush has to push his agenda, and I'm arguing that he was only weakly prefered by the American people, and thus does not really have the right to govern from the far-right. Of course, this is much the same result as 2000 (a weak victory in a divided country) and that didn't stop him from pushing an radical agenda four years ago.

And as for Bush's "record breaking number", remember that Kerry's vote total is the second highest ever gotten by any candidate (winning or losing) in history. That's not much of a record.